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Not Just Bikes / r/fuckcars / Urbanists / New Urbanism / Car-Free / Anti-Car - People and grifters who hate personal transport, freedom, cars, roads, suburbs, and are obsessed with city planning and urban design
Shipping things by water is the most efficient in terms of fuel per ton/mile, plus there's zero interface between MUH BIKES and a containership or bulk carrier out on the oceans. They do not really think about anything outside of their obsessive little bug-bubble.
Shipping things by water is the most efficient in terms of fuel per ton/mile, plus there's zero interface between MUH BIKES and a containership or bulk carrier out on the oceans. They do not really think about anything outside of their obsessive little bug-bubble.
but they will whinge about major ports having high quality road infrastructure; designed, of course, to efficiently move the large volume of goods vehicles that pass through said ports and surrounding areas at all hours of the day, but to them it's just a case of "CARBRAINS GET OUT! REEEEE!!!"
The NIMBYs have out-flanked the carfuckers from the left and they don't know what to do:
"Racism is less about skin color and more about hierarchies and maintaining power over others":
Insert link to the wheelchair-bound person's commentary on Amsterdam here:
Those uppity Negros don't know what's good for them!
You make it sound like it's hard to figure out. I know what to do and it's the obvious answer of cutting the woke bullshit from the movement. Your subreddit and Discord shouldn't have tranny fag icons and retardation about muh racism and muh transphobia is irrelevant when sperging about cars.
Otherwise, if you inject cries of racism into your messaging, don't be surprised when the opposition does too.
You see it along highways in the US too. Pisses me off but I'm not autistic enough to pull over and clean a half mile that will be full of trash the next day anyways. I leave that job to the felons looking to reduce their sentences. These are the types of people who probably never clean out their car and let trash build up in it to the point the car fucking reeks and there is rotten food on the floor.
You know the common "Don't Mess with Texas" saying comes from an incredibly successful environmental campaign to get people to stop leaving trash in the beds of their pickup trucks.
It's unreal the difference crossing the Texas-Arkansas line. You can see the border just by how much more litter is on the Arkansas side.
You make it sound like it's hard to figure out. I know what to do and it's the obvious answer of cutting the woke bullshit from the movement. Your subreddit and Discord shouldn't have tranny fag icons and retardation about muh racism and muh transphobia is irrelevant when sperging about cars.
Otherwise, if you inject cries of racism into your messaging, don't be surprised when the opposition does too.
Part of it is the issue with left-wing causes, the ouroboros eventually starts to digest itself. In this case, I would assume it's part imaginary (the "everything is racist" card) and real (black people don't want their neighborhoods fucked with, and the simple minds of /r/fuckcars is melting down with this seeming contradictory logic).
It's probably because they fetishize (?) Japan's High Speed Rail system, and rail in general. It's as if they don't know that for every rail success story, i.e. Japan, there's many more failures, i.e. China's High Speed Rail being a massive money sink that will never make a profit, and the Oahu Rail Project, where the finish date keeps getting pushed back like Duke Nukem Forever's release date, and the 1st part that is currently operational, looks to be a money sink too.
It's probably because they fetishize (?) Japan's High Speed Rail system, and rail in general. It's as if they don't know that for every rail success story, i.e. Japan, there's many more failures, i.e. China's High Speed Rail being a massive money sink that will never make a profit, and the Oahu Rail Project, where the finish date keeps getting pushed back like Duke Nukem Forever's release date, and the 1st part that is currently operational, looks to be a money sink too.
It's always amusing to see faggots babbling about subject of which they know nothing, only for someone with actual experience in the subject come along and school the faggots with facts and knowledge.
I decided to get an ebook version of Strong Towns (over my dead body would I buy a copy, and my local library doesn't have a copy) and I noticed something curious on page 119 of the ebook version.
Forget strategic investments in growth; Ferguson today is so indebted that it can’t maintain its basic infrastructure systems. In the year Brown was killed, the city spent over $800,000 making interest payments on their debts while allocating only $25,000 to the maintenance of sidewalks.(4)
What is reference point 4? Why, a link back to his own blog post from 2014. While it's curious why he didn't go back to the original source on that, the $800k was for Tax Increment Revenue Bonds, which are redevelopment subsidies, which in this case specifically related to the development of Crossings at Halls Ferry, a strip center that already has a significant vacancy (an old Shop 'n Save supermarket)...which prior to its redevelopment in the early 2000s was another strip center.
So either this dork is being deliberately disingenuous to put the blame on low-density housing or too dumb to realize what was going on.
My plans for this evening got cancelled so I've decided to torture myself once more by watching a PhilosophyTube video (albeit on 2x speed).
First off the bat Ollie's talking about a block of luxury flats that used to be the maternity hospital he was born in. He fails to mention it didn't close, but instead the maternity services transferred to the big modern hospital in Newcastle, because the pretty building was a Victorian orphanage that got retro-fitted into a hospital. Service consolidation helps the NHS run more efficiently than having lots of distributed little hospitals all over Newcastle, and those big Victorian buildings are expensive to maintain and keep to standard for clinical services (a lot of older Victorian buildings ended up getting used as offices by NHS trusts before being eventually sold off).
Part one is "Country Matters". Yes, Ollie, everyone knows that sexual innuendo from Shakespeare. He's dressed as a cowgirl. He talks about Steven Conn's "The Lies Of The Land" and explains despite the pastoral image of the countryside, it's both bad for nature (agricultural pollution, monoculture) and it's low density so inefficient for housing people. Also, big corporate farms exploit migrant workers. He then argues that places produce subjectivities - where you live shapes how you think and feel. An army town might create a sense of identity and encourage you to sign up to "serve your country" (and then he says "serving country" is his Grindr username). Because people in the military town often make up a lot of the military (country boys etc) they have conflicting subjectivities - i.e. Trump was popular in such towns because he criticised people sending kids off to war while not criticising the military and offering to expand to it. This is all you need to know to understand the rest of the video and even "the twist", he says.
The next section is about the suburbs, and this is where the NotJustBikes guy comes in. Car dependent suburbs have people that want many of the perks of rural living (space, less traffic etc) while still wanting urban amenities (good police coverage, paved streets etc). So it generates low tax revenue as it is not very dense, but has a high infrastructure cost. Meanwhile walkable urban neighbourhoods, even impoverished inner city ghettos, consistently subsidise suburbia. Cities in the US and Canada are trying to urbanise their money pit suburbs and provide alternatives to cars, but people in those suburban areas are shaped by the car centred subjectivity and so resist it. Cut back to Ollie, who's in Jesmond, a suburb of Newcastle. This is an area with good public transport links, so is suburban, but Ollie grew up further out of town in "suburbia". This was a very nice area that kept getting nicer and his parents told him he was lucky and should be kinder to the less fortunate, and therefore he started PhilosophyTube and that's how his area shaped his subjectivity (...that feels pretty tenuous). But he wonders how it would have been if he'd known fancy suburbs didn't exist alongside the less fortunate, but because of the less fortunate.
Then he goes to Forest Gate in Newham (London). He stresses he doesn't live there and isn't going to tell the internet where he lives. Then he brings up the book Terraformed by Joy White. Because it was an area in decline a lot of immigrants moved there, but there was also racism, and this helped create grime music. However Forest Gate is now getting gentrified, which Ollie says white people think about in economic terms but this is not the case, citing The City Authentic by David A Banks. Basically, you can't attract investment from industrialists, so instead you engage in "authenticity peddling" to sell your city's brand as trendy. However the cycle of gentrification means it ends up exactly like everywhere else as it becomes expensive and the only people who can afford it are upper-middle and the only businesses that can afford it are big chains. This process generates profit rather than benefitting anyone needs or wants it. Gentrifiers also engage in "slow racial violence" by focusing on e.g. the new shopping centre while erasing the unique cultures that are there, because that would involve acknowledging the inequalities that exist. Local government and police violence also deprive black people of being able to amass wealth to access the touted benefits of gentrification and instead force them out, making gentrifying their areas either... and thus gentrification creates "expanding pockets of whiteness".
This leads onto Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel Delaney, about the gentrification of Times Square. Ollie mentions there's a "swanky hotel" in Times Square where he hooked up with his ex one time, so that's the Contra shoutout for this video sorted. But Times Square used to be a working class area and middle class people would go there to party, which used to facilitate contact between people of different classes. Once it became a family friendly tourist destination, you needed money to engage with it and so it became a class segregated space. This creates subjectivities. Contact is a spontaneous interaction between strangers - for example, Ollie met "the hot guy who lives upstairs" who helped him move into his current flat, and now Ollie bakes him cookies. (Between this and Grindr is Ollie remembering he told everyone he was bisexual?). But making things more expensive turns things into networking, and if it costs money to hang out we become less likely to be open minded about hanging out, which creates cliques and snobbishness. This might be why Gen Z are having less sex - they live at home, dating costs too much, there's no third spaces they can easily go and they rely on digital communities instead - so this experience has created a subjectivity that has shaped their attitude towards sex. Also while an area might be "safer" for women when gentrified, it is not safer for the women who were forced to leave, especially sex workers, and therefore gentrification is also misogynistic and queerphobic. Gentrification inherently involves casting people out, but that makes us uncomfortable, so we lie to ourselves about it. Interclass contact prompts anxiety and this can be expressed in strange ways. Homeless people get dehumanised and concepts of danger and dirtiness are projected onto them, so that it's easier to justify using violence to move them on from an area to gentrify it. Ollie informs us this conversation about anxiety and projection is foreshadowing for the twist.
The twist is the 15 minute city conspiracy. People started protesting in Oxford about 15 minute cities, but they linked them to a bunch of completely unrelated conspiracy theories. Having done PhilosophyTube for so long, he realises some people don't want to be educated and instead want to be wilfully ignorant, because they are caught in phantasms. These are warped ways of looking at the world. Ollie first encountered the concept of phantasms in Judith Butler's new book. An example he gives is Médecins Sans Frontières tweeted that while working in Gaza, Israeli tanks targeted cars marked with their logo - and in response David Collier accused Médecins Sans Frontières of being in cahoots with Hamas and helping do the October 7th attacks. This is a demonstrably false claim. But the phantasm is "this tweet where Médecins Sans Frontières says bad things about Israel makes me feel like they support Hamas" which turns into "Médecins Sans Frontières supports Hamas" - "as if" becomes "as so". "15 minute cities make me feel as if the government is trying to control me" turns into "they are". "Trans women in women's toilets makes me feel as if I'm under attack" becames "I am". "Your feelings are reflected through the phantasm and projected out onto reality".
Basically, if you learn things that conflict with your subjectivity, it provokes anxiety, because it means you'll have to re-evaluate a lot of things you take for granted or care deeply about. If you can't avoid thinking about the thing causing you anxiety, then you may feel compelled to deploy a phantasm in order to hold contradictory beliefs. For example when planning a funeral you may think what the deceased would have wanted, which allows you to both view the deceased as gone but also as still with us. The phantasm allows you to disengage from rationality because it is the contradiction itself. This also gives the person a sense of power or control, which is why powerless people are often drawn to conspiracy theories. 15 minute cities allow politicians to use a phantasm to deal with the shitty state of development in the UK - the very policies they support are why there's such a crisis, but they can't allow themselves to acknowledge it, because they'd have an identity crisis. The solutions are "unthinkable".
Phantasms mean you're not honest with yourself about why certain ideas make you feel anxious or where these ideas come from. Essential 15 minute city conspiracies started in right wing think tanks funded by fossil fuel companies, pushing a myth of climate lockdown to turn people against green politics. The people who "powered" the phantasm added their own unrelated conspiracy theories but had fallen into a mental trap created by these think tanks. Their anxieties are around having their freedoms restricted - but migrants, asylum seekers and the homeless are actually having their freedoms restricted. This therefore means that phantasms justify otherwise unthinkable actions. Médecins Sans Frontières criticising Israel makes me feel like they support Hamas = Médecins Sans Frontières support Hamas = open fire on Médecins Sans Frontières. Trans people in bathrooms makes me feel threatened = trans people in bathrooms are a threat = exclude trans people from bathrooms. So phantasms can act as a tool of political recruitment. By catering to a range of anxieties using shill accounts, you can hook a wider range of people in... if you agree the city is being ruined by traffic calming measures, maybe you can be talked into agreeing that the city is being ruined by non-whites. "It's an Amazon recommendation algorithm for radicalisation".
Conclusions: (he's actually got a conclusions section now, since people criticise him for being so open ended). Looking at practical solutions requires you to live in practical reality. But how do you deal with people who are in a phantasm and refuse to learn? That's what the next episode is about. Also Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend blah blah blah Nebula blah blah blah Patreon (that's the whole last 10 minutes)
A bad faith summary of the urbanism section:
Living in the countryside is bad for the environment, relies on the exploitation of migrants and might make you support Trump
Living in suburbia is bad for the environment, relies on the exploitation of inner-city black people and might make you support Trump.
Gentrification serves the needs of capital rather than the needs of people, and is racist, sexist and homophobic. Also, it makes you a snob who won't mix with people outside of your social class, and might turn you into a prude.
There's bits of stuff he's cited I agree with, but the whole thing about urbanism was a bait-and-switch to talk about phantasms, which is basically a fancy way of saying brainworms. I actually found the discussion of a phantasm and the mechanism behind it interesting, although not in the way Ollie probably was aiming for.
Basically, if you encounter views or information that might challenge deeply held beliefs about yourself or the world, this creates anxiety. If you're not able to process this and change those beliefs, you might try to not think about it, but if you're compelled to think about it you can't do that either. So instead the anxiety drives you into an emotional based reasoning system that disengages from reality and empowers you to assert things as true that make no sense whatsoever. You make stuff up with no evidence and may not even believe it, but it feels like it being true would validate how you're feeling, and therefore you come to believe it is true... even when it doesn't hold up to any logical scrutiny whatsoever. The fact it doesn't make sense empowers the belief, because thinking critically about it brings back that anxiety, and things that give you anxiety must be wrong... so therefore the belief must be correct.
Because this system of thought relies on irrationality, it can then spread to making you think other batshit illogical beliefs because they also reinforces your first belief, and you're not going to critically challenge these beliefs because critically challenging things relating to your first belief might provoke that anxiety. So for example
"I'm depressed and feel like I struggle to connect with people. I'm anxious that my life's not going anywhere" -> "I'm an egg! I'm not depressed about my life, I'm transgender. If I take hormones, everything will be better." -> "Now that I'm on hormones I'm literally a woman. Actually, I'm literally female because I've changed my sex. Also, those weird cramps I keep getting aren't a gastrointestinal disturbance from my HRT, it's because I'm literally having a period" -> "If my life's not any better, it's because of transphobia, not because my life's not going anywhere. Anyone who doesn't validate me is an evil TERF who's participating in trans genocide, spreading horrible myths like we groom children into taking bathtub HRT - that never happens, but if it did, it's based. Anyway these TERFs are literally murdering us all, but also we're on the winning side of history, so eat it chuds we're going to trans your kids."
It's all a displacement from that initial anxiety that self-reinforces from irrationality driven by emotional thinking, even if some of the beliefs seem to contradict themselves, and attempting to reason someone out of it results in them just being dismissive and spewing complete non-sequiturs because they're not interested in leaving their little irrational bubble. Of course, that's not Ollie's example (he's bringing it up in relation to Judith Butler's new book) but to me at least, it does seem like a puzzle piece falling into place. Next PhilosophyTube will be about how to educate people out of the phantasms they're trapped in, which will surely be really constructive and helpful and won't at all veer into some sort of Stalinist nightmare re-education camp for people who don't think Ollie's a beautiful princess.
"this is the bougie flat I was born in. Here is why my opinions are valid."
Every fucking time with these cunts. The more I look at all these people, the more I realize they are a collective class of rootless cosmopolitans and expats with no real ties to countries or regions who imagine their life of luxury is what everyone needs. The minute one of the breadtube/urbanite channels is made by someone with an actual working class background, or someone who is an actual city-planner or some shit, I might pay attention to what they say.
I don't like the 'experts' that much more, but if people have actual credentials and have done actual work I believe their word in their field is inherently more valuable.
I don't like the 'experts' that much more, but if people have actual credentials and have done actual work I believe their word in their field is inherently more valuable.
You're right to dislike the "experts". Ray of CityNerd and Dave of City Beautiful apparently actually have or had city planning jobs. That doesn't mean they're correct of course, but they are better than the average urbanite sperg.
